> Commenting on the release, Sebastian Haselbeck of Tarantino fansite Tarantino.info says that while he’s not a fan of piracy, he believes that a failure to serve the market is the real problem.
> “I strongly condemn piracy and find it generally damaging, but it is a symptom, not the source, of market failure,” he told TF.
That's it right there. Music piracy took a long time to sort out because it was inaccessible. Now through Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube I struggle to find anyone who pirates music in my peers (it was prolific). It's not perfect yet and I think there's still some change to come but it's certainly ahead of the film industry.
1. Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.
2. People like me who are on extremely limited bandwidth connections can't watch anything in high fidelity via something like Netflix. Need a way to buffer the whole movie locally ahead of time. Let me queue it up the night before so I can watch it when I get home from work and you'll have my dollars.
> Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.
Aside: Saw Pets with my kids this week; Large Soda is now more than a Bud Light at a Football game ($8). Consider me among those who would gladly stop going to the theater.
Well to be fair, I think many people consider the snacks (soda, popcorn, candy) to be part of the movie going experience so it's hard to resist the urge to splurge. You're not wrong but there is a lot of years of marketing and persuasion behind "lets all go to the lobby..."
Lots of people just sneak in their own sodas. This is discouraged by authority, but it doesn't seem immoral. At least, it isn't more immoral than going without soda entirely, so long as one doesn't throw the empties on the floor.
I actually carry a big purse when I go to the movies to keep everyone's snacks and drinks from the dollar store down the street, just for this reason. If the movie theater's snacks/drinks were reasonably priced, I would consider forgoing the dollar store and just buy it there to save time.
Keep in mind some theatres threaten an up to $1,000,000 fine for bringing outside food into the theatre. Silly, but I guess they feel it undermines their services?
This is why I have the AMC MoviePass and go to theaters which don't care if I bring in a can of my own soda. Even the cheaper theaters want $5+ for the smallest soda. That's just ridiculous!
According to your link to box office mojo, number of tickets sold peaked in 2002, and has been declining since then, even as population has been rising.
In 1995 0.20 theatre tickets were sold per person in the world.
In 2016 slightly less than 0.13 tickets were sold per person.
This highlights 3 things.
- In the grand scheme of things most people in the world don't go to movie theaters and never have.
- Less do than ever before both in absolute terms and proportionally.
It seems unlikely that steadily raising the cost of tickets and food is going to be a sustainable way to avoid falling revenue in the future.
The smart money ought to be giving people the movie experience they want at home and giving people a higher quality experience out with a higher price tag.
The former will obliterate a lot of theaters and the latter is a smaller scale demand than the existing industry.
> If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.
That's the problem that Sean Parker is hoping to address with his proposed streaming service[1]. At $50 a movie, that doesn't seem unreasonably priced. Until then, though, there's always the Prima Cinema option[2], but then you're looking at $500 a movie, plus $100k+ for the the initial setup, so it's not a great choice if you're impoverished.
Uploading a video to Youtube if you don't have permission of the rights holders is a very clear breach of copyright.
Downloading that video (whether by watching it on Youtube or by using a tool to download the video to watch offline) is, if you don't have the permission of the rights holder another very clear copyright breach.
There's some narrow exceptions for free use, or public domain content.
I'm surprised you think it isn't. In what country would that be true?
Polish law is harmonised with the Copyright directive, which implements the WIPO treaty.
Watching a video on Youtube is only lawful if the rights holder has given their permission. Here, the rights holder hasnt given their permission and isn't getting compensation, thus it's not lawful in Polish law.
It might be useful if you provided a cite the the Polish law that gives this exemption.
The person uploading the video is clearly breaching copyright, and if they monetise the video that becomes criminal in most of EU. But the person downloading the video is also breaching copyright, albeit not criminally.
Watching already published videos is fair use in Poland.
Art 23 Ustawa o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych
> 1. Bez zezwolenia twórcy wolno nieodpłatnie korzystać z już rozpowszechnionego utworu w zakresie własnego użytku osobistego. (...)
> 2. Zakres własnego użytku osobistego obejmuje korzystanie z pojedynczych egzemplarzy utworów przez krąg osób pozostających w związku osobistym, w szczególności pokrewieństwa, powinowactwa lub stosunku towarzyskiego.
translated:
> 1. Free usage of the already published work for personal use is allowed without a permit of authors . (...)
> 2. The scope of personal use includes the use of single copies of work by a group of individuals in personal relationships, in particular blood relation, kinship or a social relationship.
You've missed "within the scope of personal use" at the end of point 1 - which (IMO) means that you can only watch the video if it was posted by a friend/relative.
Personal use just means you can't give the downloaded video to somebody else, you can't buy a giant projector and turn your house into a movie theater, that sort of thing.
Videos are edited to remove that information. "Freebooting" is the term that's used.
A Facebook group will find a popular video on Youtube, then either edit out all identifying information or just remake the video, then post it to their group to get the views and ad revenue.
Most copyright laws make a distinction between copyright infringement done as part of trade and copyright infringement done for personal use.
EDIT: For fuck's sake, this is true, and follows from WIPO Copyright Treaty into the Copyright Directive for the EU and whatever the US equivalent is. Breaching copyright as part of trade turns it into a criminal offence, merely breaching copyright for personal use is a civil tort.
That's why in the various bit-torrent legal cases people who torrent are sued for loss by companies in courts, while people who run businesses running torrent sites are prosecuted by law enforcement.
Sure, and if companies wouldn't have to pay taxes, they would make more money.
If perfectly legal, permissible, expected and ethically justifiable behaviour hurts your bottom line, your business model is broken, not your customers.
Why does HN find it so difficult to understand such a simple concept? Obviously people will download it for free that otherwise would have paid for it.
youtube-dl has actually been really useful for backing up my own channel. Simply passing it a channel url and it will download everything in the best quality available.
I go out of my way to buy DRM-free. I buy on Humble/GOG over Steam (and often filter games my DRM-free), I prefer bandcamp and buying real physical CDs at bars.
eBooks are problematic because finding DRM-free stores for current titles is near impossible and I hate that my notes and the book are tied to a B&N/Google/Amazon account unless I use tools to extract them (books + notes). I'm essentially paying near the same price as a used copy of the physical book, but I'm renting the book. If Amazon of Google ever give up their books service in a prolific blaze of fire, customers lose all those purchases.
Yup. I just bought a 4k TV, and I bought a 4k switching receiver last year. I'm not about to spend $800 on a 4k/UHD BluRay player only to find out that I can't play content because my virtually-brand-new top-end receiver doesn't support HDCP 2.2.
> If Amazon of Google ever give up their books service in a prolific blaze of fire, customers lose all those purchases.
I highly doubt Amazon would delete all the books off my Kindle if they were shutting down. I wouldn't be able to re-download them if I lose my device, but then again Barnes and Noble doesn't ship you a new book if you leave it on the bus.
This is why there needs to be a law requiring sellers to support their DRM systems for a required number of years (after last using it making a sale). Either that, or require them to unlock the DRM for affected customer.
As it stands now, sellers can sunset a DRM system with no consideration of its users.
I am also a big fan of digital comics. I have an account of Comixology but I limit myself to the DRM-free books. Luckily, most of the comics I buy are from Image Comics and Fantagraphics; and they offer their books DRM-free.
However much i do not like to spoil your party due to sharing the sentiment; please note that your example is an pyrrhic victory.
Sure, services who uphold basic principles such as listening to a market demand and adjusting prices to it exist nowadays; yet the root of the problems; it being impossible to define a marginal price; still exists.
Some of the monopolistic effects are not felt by the masses, yet they surely do exist.
Think about market entry for example, virtually impossible.
We have to raise the level of the debate i'm afraid....
If you meant thousands literally, I think it's a relatively low number. There's always going to be a large group of people seeding popular files to improve their ratio on a specific tracker. They're probably not even interested in those specific files. It's just for better reputation on the site.
> who knows how many people have downloaded from them
BT trackers do. And with enough seeds / pretend-seeds you can get a fairly precise numbers of downloaders.
There's still a number of countries where Spotify is not exactly cheap. Or where you can't get easy access to a permanent connection for streaming. But those places aren't huge record label customers either.
The top movies are getting ten of thousands of seeders. They get thousands in each of their localized version (French, German, Spanish...).
Go to one of the "current-best-streaming-site-of-the-moment.inwhatevercoutry" [1]
Some of the streaming sites publish the "views per video" (or downloads per video for DDL site). The top 10 videos are all in the hundreds of thousand of views.
The English streaming sites are in the millions of views per top video. They get more audience because of the language.
In comparison, it seems to me that music is not very popular for streaming/DDL/torrenting. If anything, it should concentrate all the views in a few places only because songs exist in a single version in a single language.
[1] easy to find in the "top 100 most visited site per country" with alexa.com :D
The use of DCP seems to be limited to very high resolution releases. HDCP is still what current era consumer hardware uses, and it's totally wide open.
The use of DCP seems to be limited to very high resolution releases.
The DCP is just a digital print (what movie theaters play for digital releases instead of the reels of film that go with analog releases). It's not really about resolution per se, it's just a term for the whole package that the theater gets.
To add to this - a typical cinema release is a pretty big file - frame-by-frame encoded as jpg2000 in 4k. Often shipped on hard drives, or downloaded via dedicated fiber lines. They key material is distributed separately, and allows for fine-grained control of play back (eg time of day - to the point that if a screening is sufficiently delayed, it may sometimes have to be cancelled if a new key can't be acquired in time...).
This all works due to proprietary hardware - the modifications to the 4k cinema projectors that enable decryption almost at the lens/imaging chip can cost as much as the projector itself, doubling the price of the projector (last I heard from around 15k to 30k USD).
With a more sane key distribution (no master keys in equipment, like with dvds) - I don't believe DCP is likely to be cracked in the same sense CSS was: probably the more likely scenario is that some insider leak some of the distributors private keys which would allow certain releases to be cracked - but would likely also trigger key roll over.
Also worth nothing that the DCP format is pretty nice, has optional encryption - and you can make your own. With the right contacts you can view your own footage on on a cinema screen :-)
a typical cinema release is a
pretty big file - frame-by-frame
encoded as jpg2000 in 4k. Often
shipped on hard drives, or
downloaded via dedicated fiber
lines.
This is not a show stopper. All you need is one unlocked copy to drop in the open, and then everyone can work on it, and get it packed up in a more reasonable format.
This all works due to proprietary
hardware - the modifications to the
4k cinema projectors that enable
decryption almost at the lens/imaging
chip can cost as much as the projector
itself, doubling the price of the
projector (last I heard from around
15k to 30k USD).
So, yeah, that's great, but the only level of piracy that could deter is the pixel-perfect variety. A motivated individual with a comparable budget could probably optically extract a high quality duplicate with an expensive digital video camera (and perhaps even a beam splitter), and pull signal from the speaker transducers with professional audio recording equipment.
There'd be no real need to tamper with proprietary hardware or intrude on the chasis of the projector. With reasonable equipment, it's likely that a person could reproduce a re-recording of a movie that is very-nearly indistinguishable from the factory source, perhaps except for negligible artifacts that might irritate only the holiest of true believers.
> a typical cinema release is a pretty big file - frame-by-frame encoded as jpg2000 in 4k
In a way it's shocking that huge cinema screens ONLY project 4k. When we had film instead of digital projectors, we actually had a much higher resolution on screen. It's a shame we replaced it with an inferior technology.
I'm not convinced. If you happen to see a fresh print, with no scratches, dirt, skipped sprockets, or speed issues then - yes - it is theoretically marginally better than a digital print.
Similarly, a highly priced vinyl player might have slightly better sound quality than a cheap CD player.
But for most people, digital Cinema and CDs represent a vastly superior experience.
Wait. Film is not just better for resolution, it has much better dynamic range and color depth than digital (digital is coming close, but still not there yet).
It's not because a technology is newer that it is necessarily better. CRT still holds some advantages over LCDs, Paper still holds advantages over e-ink, and so on. Of course Digital photography wins by a large amount for cost and convenience, but that's not the whole picture.
I work in the film industry, a 35mm full-aperture negative scan holds only about 2048x1556 pixels-worth, and even at that resolution the film-grain blobs are several pixels across (especially in the blue channel).
True and not true. I own few telecine and film scanning machines. Most of older film material, esp. 16mm isn't worth scanning over full 2k. 1556 in y on 16mm esp. important because lots of people want to reframe into 16:9 and 1556 gives more than 1080.
Anyways, most of old stock (print, negative, ip) have grain such that over cca. 2.5k won't yield anything better. However, kodak and fuji stock from mid to late eighties definitwly is worth capturing at higher detail. Highest-detailed stock from nineties we've measured to have spatial rwsolution of around 8.5k and that's about as high as you will get (rare) out of 35mm.
> I work in the film industry, a 35mm full-aperture negative scan holds only about 2048x1556 pixels-worth
There are enough good 4k releases of classic movies to see this is not the case. You can compare the 4k and HD release (which is just under the resolution you provided).
I regularly scan Vision 3 film (movie stock) and Velvia 50 and Velvia 100 (E6). I scan it professionally at 10 Mpix, but when I have a good picture, I pay big bucks to have it drum scanned at 100 Mpix. Yes, it's not 100 Mpix, there's about 15-25 Mpix worth of detail there, but it's much, much more detail than the 10 Mpix scan.
Apologies it does sound[1] like an absolutely perfectly shot 35mm frame can theoretically hold up to 20 million pixels-worth, but I've never seen this in practice in the vfx industry, it's almost always less than the ~3 million pixels that 2048x1556 provides.
The Hateful Eight had a little media blitz when it first came out because you could watch it in a number of theaters that still do 70mm, and I think Tarantino was the reason.
Even if the film theoretically has a higher "pixel" density the projector smudged it out by not fully fixing the frame. Difital is sharp because the pixel raster does not move. Even the best cinema projectors wobble the individual pictures around.
Film has grain, which is a type of non-chroma signal-dependent noise that is not unpleasant like chromatic signal-independent sensor noise or shot noise you get digitally in photography (not in movies, they have good lighting there).
In fact, grain is actually useful, as it's aesthetically pleasing in small amounts, can increase apparent sharpness. In fact it's so useful digital creations fake back in post-production a small amount of grain.
> The resolution is not as high as you are imagining.
The resolution of 4k projection is not as high as you are imagining either. It's just 4096x2160 lines (often less, depending on aspect ratio) or 8.8 megapixels.
In the best circumstances you can get 25Mpix of useful data from a 35mm frame shot on low grain stocks like 5203. In the worst circumstances you get 10Mpix. This is 35mm, The Hateful Eight was shot on 65mm stock, which has a camera frame surface are of 3.44 times the camera surface of 35mm film.
Either way, the resolution of 4k digital cinema is fine, I miss more the old contrast and gamut.
Maybe you don't find grain to be unpleasant, but I certainly do. I tolerate it when the source had it and there is no choice, but I certainly don't like it.
And no, it's not aesthetically pleasing in any amount. Directors that add it back artificially should be criticized. It looks like there is a swarm of gnats flying across the screen, and unless there are a ton of bugs in the scene it doesn't belong.
> This is 35mm, The Hateful Eight was shot on 65mm stock, which has a camera frame surface are of 3.44 times the camera surface of 35mm film.
It won't stay that way by the time you watch it, it will have been copied multiple times, and it's on 35mm again. The effective resolution as seen in the actual theater does not beat 4k, and you have additional noise which lowers the resolution even more.
The main thing though is that noise is worse than lack of resolution. Depending on how far you are from the screen more resolution is meaningless - but noise (like film grain) is always a problem.
> I miss more the old contrast and gamut.
I suspect you are missing what never was. Digital is better on both.
> It won't stay that way by the time you watch it, it will have been copied multiple times, and it's on 35mm again.
No, it's not on 35mm again. I've watched the 70mm projection of The Hateful Eight. At no intermediary point the film was on 35mm.
The intermediate film stocks and the print stock are very special low-sensitivity stocks (Kodak 2383 has ISO 1.6, Kodak 5302 has ISO 6) that have no discernible grain whatsoever. You can't see the Kodak 2383 grain with a grain focuser. All the grain comes from the original negative. You do lose some spatial resolution with multiple copies, but you don't add grain. I'll note that modern print film like Kodak 2383 can resolve 550 lines per mm, and contact printing has a minimal loss of quality due to imperfect optics. Granted, a showprint will always be better than a release print, but the copying process is much better than you give it credit for.
> noise (like film grain) is always a problem
Not really, dithering is essential for all video processing. Your very clean image is actually full of noise. Without dithering, videos (and movies) would look bad.
> I suspect you are missing what never was. Digital is better on both.
Absolutely nonsense. Kodak 2383 has a D-Max or 4, giving a contrast of 10000:1. Kodak Vision Premier Color has a D-Max of 5.5 giving a contrast of about 310000:1. Yes, not a typo, one-third of a million to one. There is no other technology that can achieve these deep blacks. Digital projection doesn't come any close, the best projectors today, (the ones that you won't find in any run-of-the-mill theatre) can barely do 2000:1.
DCI-P3, the color space used in digital cinema was modeled after print stock gamut, but because of technological limitations, it's not identical. Cyans and yellow has a higher chroma on film. Green on film has a higher chroma at the expense of luminosity. Other colors are pretty much the same.
The only way for digital projection to have a higher gamut is to switch to laser projection AND to retire DCI-P3. You need a green laser to produce more saturated greens.
Digital cameras are capable of recording a larger gamut than film, but unfortunately there is no technology to display these colors outside laser projection, and you need to switch the whole movie industry to a new color space.
Grain is not noise. Digital is cleaner because your pictures and movies go through tons of filters before you actually get them on screen.
If you go down to the microscopic level film goes way beyond the resolution you can ever hope to achieve with the best digital cameras out there. It's just not something that is expressed in pixels.
Grain is in fact noise. Noise: Things that are not in the actual signal.
> If you go down to the microscopic level film goes way beyond the resolution you can ever hope to achieve with the best digital cameras out there.
That simply isn't true. At the microscopic level film pixels look like "clouds" of colored ink. The pixels are not square, but they are there, and they are not the size of atoms, but much larger - you can see them in a typical microscope (I know, because I tried it).
Digital is cleaner not because of filters, but because the actual capturing technology produces a cleaner signal.
A couple of years ago there was still an argument, but these days the argument is over. Digital clearly won.
> At the microscopic level film pixels look like "clouds" of colored ink.
No, only color reversal film (slides) looks like clouds. Negative film, the one used in movies, looks like crystals (because they are crystals).
> actual capturing technology produces a cleaner signal
This is true, albeit for a film like Kodak 5203 or Kodak 5213, you'd have a hard time proving that this is true. These stocks are so smooth with good exposure and proper development (as it done when making movies) that you need a grain focuser to see the grain. Many blockbusters and big productions that you probably saw in a digital cinema were shot on this film, and you never knew.
> Digital clearly won
Digital is much cheaper, it's very good, and allows much easier intermediate processing (editing, vfx, color timing, etc). Of clourse it "won", although film is still widely used, and although archival copies are still done on film.
The fact that digital won doesn't mean that projection has better resolution (it's roughly the same for 35mm, but worse for larger formats) or better contrast (it's far, far worse for digital) or better colors (film has more saturated cyan and yellow, although this doesn't matter much). It sure has less flicker though.
There are still plenty of reasons why people shoot film, use a digital intermediate workflow, and print film today.
> A couple of years ago there was still an argument, but these days the argument is over. Digital clearly won.
You are using survivor bias to prove your point. My point is that Digital is inferior in SOME aspects to Film - and it still stands. The fact that Digital won has nothing to do with the facts to be considered when doing a comparison.
Which has been irrelevant ever since the late 90s since 99.9% of films since then has been digitally scanned from film (usually in 2K, sometimes in 4K), edited, and then reprinted on film from the digital intermediate.
Pretty much any digital cinema projection suite will be able to play your run of the mill quicktime/h264 file, so DCP is hardly a requirement to watch cat videos on a cinema screen.
DCP can be a pain in the ass for indie filmmakers, though. These days it's easy to generate a DCP from footage, but basically impossible to test it without actually putting it through a DCP projector in a cinema. This is crazy.
I'm not sure what parent means, but I've projected quite a few DCP films made by individuals / beginners at movie festivals - hand often the technical quality is heart-breakingly bad: the colour, resolution, encoding/compression and sometimes frame rate can be off. Most of these are fixable if you know what you are doing.
But it takes a lot of experience to imagine what a frame that looks great on a ~24 inch monitor will look like when projected in a theater.
I would strongly recommend that anyone dreaming to screen something in cinemas make a deal with their local cinema in order to do test screenings - to check picture and sound. Just like with anything else, there's no substitute for testing under "real" conditions.
Note that most(?) cinema setups will happily take some form of digital audio/video signal and run it through dolby surround and project it - so you don't have to start testing with a DCP file. But you certainly should test that in a cinema before distribution.
Also note that the "player" part of a fixed installation might have quirks/bugs that software that's more easily updated might work around (think mplayer vs a cheap old DVD player).
> probably the more likely scenario is that some insider leak some of the distributors private keys which would allow certain releases to be cracked - but would likely also trigger key roll over.
It could also be the case that someone leaked the plaintext symmetric key(s) for this specific movie's DCP. If someone gained access to private/secret keys on a compromised DCP player somewhere, it'd be smarter to leak symmetric keys for individual movies to avoid detection.
Anything that films in 4k+, post production, and then "print" to DCP. If you make 3d/digital film you could render to 4k single frames and use that for your DCP (although for a professional workflow you would probably want to follow regular workflow, with post production, sound and end up with one or two "print" stages - depending if your toolkit is any good for "printing" to DCP. Afaik Adobe premier is still quite useless for making DCPs, you're better off rendering to single frames and building the DCP with a dedicated tool).
Times are changing. I am very happy for these new developments.
If you have the right friends, and hang out with the right group of people, you can get sometimes unencrypted material, just like in the old days you could get film reels. But a 35mm film projector was relatively affordable, this new digital stuff is still crazy expensive.
I'm curious what I should be keeping an eye out for, what sorts of people would be the most interesting to chase, etc, to maximize my chances of causing this opportunity to present itself at some point in the future. (I'm not particularly social right now.)
The point of DRM is to make that time, motivation, and quality equation not make sense. Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue.
I'm not defending DRM, but it's important to know one's enemy.
Is that true, though? I'd expect that the people who only download cracked games will wait for the game to be cracked and up for download, no matter how long that takes. The people who download games to trial them and then buy the ones they like will likewise wait until they can give it a shot before potentially wasting money. The last group, those who buy legit copies of games at or near release, are going to buy it no matter what.
When it comes to watching movies, I will take the path of least resistance. Not even for moral or philosophical reasons; I'm just lazy. Netflix/Amazon/[streaming site] is easier than pirating is easier than buying a Bluray disk at a store, so that's the order I'll do things in if I want to see the film badly enough.
I don't even own a DVD/Bluray player. If I can't find it on a streaming site (whether subscription service like Netflix, or buying it, ala Amazon) Then... :-/ Hoist the Jolly Roger.
It's frustrating wanting to give money for something, and not being able to.
I have a friend who has an approach I like. He buys the Blu-Ray from Amazon, usually used if possible, then immediately goes and pirates it on to his home media server. When the disc arrives, he tosses it in a box that sits in the corner and never touches it again.
This way he made a legal purchase and exchanged money, but still gets a DRM-free high quality copy to move around to his various devices.
That's a really cool approach, but taking the time to rip the disc means you get the extras and other features that were on the disk, along with a significantly higher quality encode of the content.
If the focus is on quantity and diversity, I can understand just getting a decent-bitrate MKV or MP4 of just the film, but it might be worth it to see if there are Blu-Ray rips of the media in question "around" before just grabbing what's out there; at the very least, complete (and perhaps even decrypted, since that's finicky) rips have reasonable value on private trackers.
I'm guessing this sort of thing has probably already been taken into account.
There actually are people who would pirate a game but then buy it if it's not available for download. I suspect they're a fairly small group though. Too bad we don't know how large it is in comparison to the group of people who don't purchase before they get to try a (likely pirated) copy, or the people who don't buy games with DRM (I'm mostly in this group).
I agree in principle, but I think the adage that "Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue" is a bit of a false equivalency.
There is almost a controlled experiment here (similar data to many economics papers).
For each movie, copies are released over time and a correlation can be looked at between quality of rip, distribution by file sharing, and box office receipts.
The "problem" is that it would obviously show that the impact of torrenting is much less than one lost sale per download. And reflect that even the downloads that are lost sales are offset to some degree by the people who download to sample and then buy when they otherwise wouldn't have, and the free promotion from the people who downloaded it talking about it with other people etc.
The result is that the likely "negative impact" would be small or could even be positive, which isn't the narrative Hollywood wants to spin. Because they actually want DRM for entirely different reasons than that, specifically because it allows them to control content delivery and thus prevent independent content from being displayed on equal footing with big studio content.
> a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue.
Yes and now, You cannot say that people who pirate games are necessarily going to buy the game if it were not "free". That's the argument used by the industry to justify DRM and it makes no sense whatsoever since the market would be like 100 times bigger if you calculate things this way. It would not.
> The point of DRM is to make that time, motivation, and quality equation not make sense. Every day that a new videogame stays off Piratebay is an extra day of full revenue.
This can't be true as written, as long as people expect it to show up there eventually. Every day it stays off piratebay is an extra day of revenue intermediate between full and "already out on piratebay" levels.
The DRM works because the value of these things appears to be greatly time-sensitive -- most of the cost is already getting-it-right-away, which DRM can protect, rather than the fundamental timeless value of the product, which DRM can't protect.
It's a great idea, but I don't know if it's like that for video games though. They may earn more money, but when they fail to code a proper backend and the launch breaks their system, they lose even more. Like for the last SimCity.
It depends on what the desired outcome of the DRM is. A prime example of effective DRM is Denuvo [0]. Loosely speaking, there are two main groups of people who pirate games - those who would buy it otherwise, and those who wouldn't. There's not much you can do about the latter group, so they're not really worth considering. The former group however are the potential lost sales. The sales for a AAA video game usually peak on release or very shortly after, and fall off a cliff very quickly., If your DRM system manages to keep a crack for your game from being leaked for the first few weeks of its life, you will capture many of the people who fall into the "might buy your game" category.
The DRM for games is altogether another beast than DRM for movies or audio. Games are interactive so while cracking them should in theory always be possible (unless they are server based), the cracked version represents a possible threat to the users. Did really someone crack the software for the fun of it or is it malware? With movies such concerns are limited to exploiting bugs in movie players, so attack surface is much lower. Also, all one needs to do is capture the output and write it to file. The "hack" is quite trivial with proper equipment.
Regarding HDCP, while 1.x is currently wide open, I'm not aware of any "crack" of HDCP 2.2, the currently required version for 4k content. There might have been keys leaked, but key extraction is only getting harder, with devices embedding keys deeper into the chipsets, with software/hardware video paths inaccessible from traditional OSes, etc.
Also, I would be surprised their isn't a watermark in there that will point to the cinema who leaked the version.
> If you can view it, you can copy it... it's just a matter of time, motivation, and desired quality.
And exactly the time and motivation needed is why DRM can work in the end. Modern DRM schemes like AACS employ methods to change keys for new works. So when crackers find a key that allows them to circumvent the DRM scheme they can't publish it or it would soon get useless and they would have to do the work to extract a key again.
This is probably what we're seeing here.
This means that for consumers the DRM stays effective. They can't do copies of things they legally bought.
Modern DRM schemes like AACS
employ methods to change keys
for new works. So when crackers
find a key that allows them to
circumvent the DRM scheme they
can't publish it or it would
soon get useless and they would
have to do the work to extract
a key again.
Okay, just think about this for a minute.
Who would EVER care about a cipher key, when YOU STILL NEED TO EXPOSE THE RAW PIXEL RASTER, AND AUDIO CHANNELS TO THE END USER, IN ORDER FOR ANYTHING TO BE VALUABLE AT ALL?
Users will always eventually get the whole thing in the clear, in straight-up plain text somehow, eventually anyway. And all anyone needs is a buffer big enough to capture it, and it's trivial to assemble one.
You need to be able to watch a movie with the naked eye, and hear the sound with your ears. That's how movies work.
It's trivial to capture the raw data, and people have been living with NTSC quality picture and sound for decades.
This is not about perfectly matching the SHA256 hashes of the original MPEG artifacts. People just want a copy, and it's easy to skim one, somehow, one way (cracking) or another (brute force direct copies of the image frames and pulse code samples, at the signal source).
Yes, of course, but it's a lossy copy since you're de-compressing and then re-compressing the content. (At 4k is that as important? I dunno, I'm not a movie fanatic.)
I would not say a brute force copy must be necessarily lossy by default.
In theory, if the picture is revealed on a display, upon which the full pixel raster can be distinguished for every frame (in real time or slower), an optical capture may be performed, which preserves the original fidelity of the image, and one need not recompress as lossy for peers who have the capacity to receive the full duplicate.
All images are eventually revealed optically somehow. Such images may be captured directly, and corrected and restored according to original quality, if you have good video equipment.
Only one good copy needs to make it into the open, and then the cat's out of the bag.
I don't know DCP, but from reading wikipedia it's something different than HDCP:
HDCP is encryption during transmission (like SSL), e.g. encryption while transferring the movie data through the HDMI cable. It is not used for encrypting data on a storage medium (like CSS, and apparently also DCP are).
I find it amusing that after all these decades people are still willing to claim some sort of moral high ground in defense of their desire for entertainment.
Filmmakers themselves talk about movies being culture as well as entertainment, and without piracy, being part of contemporary culture become (even more) a matter of your disposable income. So regardless if it is moral or not ( what is moral is not easily established in a global context ) we can ask if piracy does more good than bad for society ? Is there an even better alternative ?
In the end, copyright is based on laws created by governements as trade agreements, rarely involving the voting public when it's not a dictator or monarch making the rules. In effect copyright is a matter of law, not moral, and sometimed the law is not moral. In this case, I stay my judgement as it can only cloud the real issues.
Personally I think everybody who is not an adult, without a job or a home should by default be allowed free access to anything we call culture. Being part of society is - which everyone should be - is down to having a shared context. The so called entertainment is a major part of this, and without access to it you become an 'other', the outsider.
I find it amusing that after all these decades people are still willing to have cultural artefacts being distributed at the whim of corporations rather than passionate archivists who actually care for the work.
So many movies are only available commercially in their objectively worst version (pan and scan, poor subtitles, no subtitles just dubbing, missing scenes, censored scenes, poor audio or poor picture), people who actually care for the film more than the copyright holders go out of their way to combine several awful versions into a version better than commercially available because they actually care about what they're distributing because it's for passion not profit..
I find it amusing that people in the US have been willing to extend copyright from the original 28 years to 100 years, and in most cases to give no moral rights to the artists involved in the creation of the work.
And this is the framework the US is pushing the rest of the world to adopt.
> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
> That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
After all these centuries, people are still willing to claim some sort of moral high ground in killing other people for their beliefs. And downloading a file is amusing?
Some people believe that copyright infringement is a morally acceptable response to copyright terms changing from limited to effectively infinite duration.
Copyright on a song or book is like ownership. Imagine a scenario where you mould from clay an amazing aesthetically pleasing shape. Do you think that it should be taken from you after a set time period?
No it isn't like ownership, because I can make a perfect copy without taking away yours. After 3 years or so showing off your clay sculpture and making money from it, why should I be able to make copies freely?
It's worth noting that the DCP format doesn't have a master key - each "reel" of an encrypted film has its own content key, which is decrypted by each DCP player's private FIPS protected key combined with a public Key Delivery Message from the distributor.
So if the DCP was indeed cracked, it was either because they gained access to the FIPS module in a DCP playback server, or they gained access to the plaintext content keys where the KDMs are generated. If they have the server's private key, they will be able to decrypt every other film that they have a KDM for and we should expect to see more DCP releases.
> they will be able to decrypt every other film that they have a KDM for and we should expect to see more DCP releases.
If you have individually encrypted copies, it would be stupid to not also individually watermark them on the content level. With a bit of targeted key invalidation, this could well be contained to a one time breach.
There is just one encrypted copy, with one key. But that key has many copies, each encrypted with a different copy. The device takes its private key, and uses it to acquire the "master" key, which is then used to decrypt the media.
Of course, every movie release has its own "master" key.
Even AACS on bluray discs can have multiple different copies of some parts of the video to watermark different sets of device keys. I know footage from theaters can be watermarked too, so I'd be very surprised if this distribution method didn't also have some kind of identification.
As far as I know, MXF basically contains JPEG pictures and because of that, it can't use motion prediction algorithms used in modern video codes, so the size of 40 GB for a 4K video in H.264 format is possible.
But I agree that it's better to see the original decrypted container.
Firstly DCPs are not wrappers that contain MXFs. From what I remember DCP predates MXF.
From memory (its been 8 years since I've actually dealt with creating them) They are effectively zip files that contain JPEG2000, lots of metadata and some sound tracks.
Crucially, the authoring and encryption are controlled by a central authority. Each projector needs to be registered with a KDM to make sure it can receive decryption keys. http://www.artsalliancemedia.com/software/screenwriter#featu... is one system for managing projectors.
Getting a distribution DCP is pretty hard, also Keys are short lived. But, someone people create non-encrypted DCPs for various purposes.
If its a MXF, then that suggests its either from a finishing house, or more likely a producer's laptop. (ie how wolverine got leaked, a pissed up producer leaving an unencrypted laptop on a plane. Even though their flight was pointless, as there are many remote viewing systems about. )
DCP developer here. DCP track files are MXF. SMPTE ST 377:2004 (MXF) predates SMPTE ST 429-3:2007 (DCP Sound and Picture.) ST 377 is a normative reference of ST 429-3. There is no zip file. There is no central registration for encryption. Each Media Block has a 2k RSA key (usually generated inside the FIPS 140 boundary), and each content distributor has a collection of the respective X.509 certificates.
The article links to the leak, where there are screenshots from both the DCP and US Blu-ray versions of the movie. The new (DCP) source looks way better, has much more detail. Both are in H.264 format at obscenely-high bit rates. Other than cutting the file size in half for the same bit rates, I wonder how H.265 would fare on this epic movie!
I'm no expert on DCP or encryption. But from what I've read DCP uses AES 128, they probably didn't crack that. But also each projector gets its own unique key to decode the movie. Which I assume is somehow combined with the key in the projector to create the real decryption key.
So my first guess is that they had the ability to snoop on multiple key exchange messages and some how used that knowledge to find a shortcut to solve AES based on the gleaned knowledge from all the gathered keys, or they broke into a projector and took its internal key.
Some of the projectors are connected to the DCP playback server via encrypted HD-SDI. The content is link-encrypted between the server and projector using Texas Instrument's "Cinelink" technology. If the TI "Enigma" module's private key was leaked, this would enable recording the plaintext SMPTE 292M video stream in real-time. The audio is un-encrypted obviously and easy to record, but it is watermarked so they would be able to trace back the recording to a specific KDM.
Jesus, they put so much effort into "encrypting" this data when it fundamentally needs to be available in a decrypted format for the users to watch it. At the end of the day, there's always the analog hole (or, more likely, the digital hole between the rendering chip and the MEMS array or LCD or whatever other mechanism lives inside the projector). No matter how many convoluted layers of encryption they throw at these things, there's always somewhere you can stick a camera or a few high-bandwidth digital signal analyzers and recover the content with at worst slightly degraded quality.
DCP isn't a consumer format (yet), it's only intended to protect the movie before it comes out on Bluray. And the encryption isn't convoluted at all, the private/public key system is essentially the same as what protects your information when you log into your bank's website.
> there's always somewhere you can stick a camera or a few high-bandwidth digital signal analyzers and recover the content with at worst slightly degraded quality
And hence you have a safer product? The exact thing they are trying for?
The objective is to slow down pirate release. Seems to be working exactly as planned.
All I know is that the music industry learned a long time ago DRM didn't work and wasn't worth it, and I can now buy MP3 files on any service, and play them on any device. And while I don't engage in movie piracy myself, I hope these pirates are successful in driving studios to that same point, where I can happily shell over $30 for a 4K file and use it how I want to.
There's a difference though. DRM music files are sold directly to consumers. These consumers have to be able to decrypt the files on their own computers / devices which makes DRM useless.
The movie files in this case are not meant for consumers. They're only decrypted on specialised equipment not accessible to the general public. If you manage to get your hands on a DCP file there's nothing you can do to decrypt it without access to the specific projector system it was intended for (unless someone screwed up somewhere of course)
Yeah, but let's be honest, if I had a job as a manager at a theater and a moderate amount of reverse engineering skill or a small team of friends with those, well, time, access and tools combine quite well...
Sure, they make it look all secure, pass it through all that crypto and stuff but ultimately it has to be passed to the projector chip in some form which is unencumbered to be turned into light. At which point it's fairly trivial to dump. Anti-tampers on the case are probably fairly limited.
According to another comment here, the anti tamper mechanics on those projecters are not limited. They are in fact quite aggressive.
If they have been any kind of smart when designing them, the decoded stream takes a limited, shielded, and highly tamper resistant path to the projector chip, and each and every critical component are paired with each other such that switching one of the out automatically destroy all keys.
I'm under the impression that the last level of decryption is done in the projector chip itself. So while accessing the unencumbered stream is theoretically possible, it definitely requires a lot more than a moderate amount of reverse engineering skill and serious amounts of equipment.
So UHD BlueRays, they don't use DCP correct? But those haven't been broken as well (as far as we know), and that seems like the media to target to create 4k torrents.
Another option is that somebody got ahold of some HDCP chips that fell off the back of a truck. There are Chinese companies (Explore Semi and friends) that make HDCP repeater chips with decryption / encryption capabilities. Those bad boys can take an HDCP-protected input stream and strip the encryption right off.
DCP controls chip sales very tightly in the US, but I imagine it's a practical impossibility in Shenzhen.
You don't even need go get the chips, devices like this strip the HDCP and turn the stream into MJPEG.
http://blog.danman.eu/reverse-engineering-lenkeng-hdmi-over-...
Here is their 4K device, don't know if it works like the HD device, but it would seem there is a fair chance it does.
I wonder if there's any way to measure the actual financial impact on this movie, which I'm guessing is close to zero (and the MPAA will tell you is millions of dollars). The amount of work and security put into these encryption schemes is sizable to say the least. But is anyone that wouldn't pirate it later going to pirate it now?
I think the MPAA count each watch as a potential purchase - when it's simply not true at all.
I'll admit that I sometimes watch a poor cam video before going to the cinema. It costs £10 a ticket plus food and fuel - about £15. Critiques often don't represent what I like in films, so I would just not go.
Pirated films probably encourages people to watch films. It can create a bigger hype around a film.
I think the war on piracy somewhat echoes the issues of the war on drugs.
Because it was part of the marketing campaign to get people to see it in the theatres. It was an experience that you were unable to get in any other way, and so it was more special and (theoretically) should draw more people to it.
I went to it, and all the little touches (like the pamphlets) were really well done, and it was indeed a special, memorable experience.
It's like limited-edition figures or tins. Some people buy them because they're limited, and it's part of the selling point. The company can't later release it because it'd no longer fit the original sales spiel.
Time will tell. DCP has a lot of security built-in. Both in hardware (FIPS certified, anti-intrusion, etc.) and in Software -- encryption up the wazoo.
Studios rely on a lot of insecure distribution and storage mechanisms for the big DCP file and instead rely heavily on the secure key exchange.
If they have cracked DCP, somehow, then it is a major coup.
Presumably the studio sends a master to Okko and then Okko transcodes it into various formats for streaming. Imagine an insider sets the transcoder to output 4K H.264 and then leaks the resulting file. It sounds like encryption won't help here.
They wouldn't send a DCP stream for transcoding. DCP stream can only be decoded by the media block inside the projector and the output physically goes to the projector chip. The system has safe guards against physical intrusion. If you open the projector, it wipes all the keys. The level of paranoia in that thing is insane.
They keys only get programmed by the studios at manufacture time, and there is no servicing of the parts in the decode chain. The whole module has to be replaced.
I actually worked on a media block design about 10 years ago.
Insane, the levels we'll go to in order to secure content from hitting someone's eyeballs and ears before ensuring money changed hands in the vague direction of the content creators at some point.
If you're protecting movies that each cost $300 million to produce and made $1 billion in box office takes (just checking the latest Avengers movie for that number), then spending $10 million on a copy protection scheme looks like it makes sense.
I watched some random YouTube videos on someone talking about digital cinema units, so this is all second hand half-remembered knowledge, so take it for what it's worth.
From what I recall, the security module has it's own battery backup, intrusion detection, etc. If the module detects tampering or it's battery goes flat, the keys are wiped.
There was some talk about that you can't keep "spare" security modules hanging around, they need to be installed in a projector periodically to recharge the onboard battery.
The media block has a small micro inside the controls the HSM. It runs on an internal back-up battery. If the unit is opened, or tampered with then it wipes all the keys. That module is FIPS certified against intrusion.
UHD Blu-ray doesn't introduce new disc formats, but compatibility with the variant does require support for 3- and 4-layer discs (2-layer, 50GB, discs are also still supported for UHD). These aren't new for UHD, but they were introduced after the regular 1080p standards were set--nothing really stops a 1080p movie from using them too, except compatibility with very old players.
Still, as other commenters note, these large disc sizes accommodate for high quality. If we have a 100GB disc format, and you want the 4K video to appear in the best possible quality, you will choose some encoding options that fill up most of that 100GB disc, minus whatever the special features and audio tracks cost. Most consumers won't care about the size: it's on a disc, they're not ripping it to a hard drive of their own.
And a YIFY 1080p release is less than a 4.5GB DVD, why did we need a different disc format for regular Blu-Ray?
A VCD release fits on a 700MB CD, why did we need a different disc format for DVD?
You can make video files come out any size you like - even 1 MB - if you're willing to make the tradeoffs (on both quality and time-to-encode dimensions). There's also a limited amount of hardware you can put into a set-top player while keeping a consumer-friendly price point.
You could still sell the set-top player (which aren't really at a "low" price point) with H.265 as the codec on the current-gen Blu-Ray disc - reducing manufacturing costs.
Normally those kind of decisions are optimized by free market competition. It doesn't seem to have kicked-in in this case, probably due to the elephants in the room (piracy and streaming) having zero capex cost.
I suspect that the Hateful Eight compresses considerably better then most movies due to the amount of time outside in the endless snow. If it compresses 20% better then a movie of a similar length (like one of the LOTR), one of those movies could go over the 50GB size.
In the early/mid 2000s there was a whole scene around manually applying inverse telecine to badly produced commercial anime releases, with custom tools like YATTA.
Don't get me started about pre-widescreen episodes of Family Guy. I don't know how they ruined them, but they're all ruined with horrible, burned-in interlacing artefacts.
The article links to the leak, where there are 4K screenshots of the leaked (DCP) version and the Blu-ray version, and the leaked version looks much nicer. :)
Not really related but I didn't know about the integral cut of Kill Bill (it's possible to find it online). Any other gems like this? Maybe there's websites about this.
Apparently there is ONE theater in the world (in California of course!) that shows it and it's REALLY GOOD.
EDIT: The one floating around the internet seems to be a fan cut. I'm curious how it holds up to the actual thing.
That's what I heard.
Also the the Roadshow cut of Hateful Eight. That was shown in more places. I could have seen it, but they asked for an arm and a leg, and I need those!
I saw the Roadshow cut at our local art house. It was beautiful. IIRC it was definitely not even 2x the cost of a regular ticket and it came with a commemorative booklet.
The DVD format in NTSC regions has 480 pixel vertical resolution. Even the half-century old NTSC spec has more vertical lines (525). I find it amazing that DVDs are still being sold.
That's not how it works. Those 525 lines include the beam moving from the bottom right of the screen back to the top left to start to display the next frame (vertical blanking). There are only around 480 lines visible on the screen. The non-image lines is where things like teletext would be transmitted.
The 525 includes a lot of other stuff. Easy mistake because PAL shows 576 lines (out of 625), but only at 25 full frames / 50 interlaced half-frames per second as opposed to 30p/60i for NTSC. (PAL DVDs are also 576.)
While they're all constrained by the scanline in the vertical direction, the analog standards are resolution-limited in the horizontal raster by the bandwidth / frequency response of your signal chain; I've seen beta-derived analog NTSC that's gorgeous, far better than DVD. Especially on a really well-corrected CRT monitor (really!).
The decision to go to an even 480p for DVD probably derives from the 8x8 pixel blocks of the MPEG-2 compression. Having raster dimensions that are evenly divisible by 8 is a good thing for a lot of these block-based codecs; I believe MPEG-2 couldn't go below 8x8 (h.264 can accommodate smaller and non-square macroblocks, though).
That said, there's a nugget of truth in your comment. When we go to digital, we often get better average fidelity, but worse maximum fidelity. A beautiful analog system can be really great. Maybe in twenty years we'll have a hipster revival of 70mm film prints? It's the new vinyl...
(I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek; reports from Ang Lee's latest movie are that the digitally-captured 4096p120 stereo 3D is better than the real thing. I saw 30-year film industry veterans were walking out of a test screening shaking their heads in disbelief -- I couldn't get in because the line was around the hall.)
Even a DVD with a 16:9 image uses non-square pixels, so it encodes 480 "scanlines" but a 4:3 TV with 480 scanlines won't show the full vertical resolution. (If it did, the horizontal would either be squished or cut off at the sides.) A lot of people were buying HDTVs without bluray players because their DVDs looked so much better when they could see the full resolution.
The "economics" here are interesting. One of the sources attributes the piracy to a "market failure". This is not accurate. As price falls to zero and supply is infinite (piracy) there is nothing to restrain demand. Sure I want all those Tarantino special cuts if they don't cost me anything. Got Tarkovsky in 4K? I'll take that too.
Pirates try to justify their thefts in economic terms but at the end of the day they are no different than someone taking socks from Walmart. They want goods or services that others have worked to produce without compensating them for their work.
Seriously, just own it dude. I stole this movie because I wanted it and I could. The Hateful Eight 4K is tearing down the academic pay wall to bring knowledge to the masses. It's a free movie and Cheetos.
> Pirates try to justify their thefts in economic terms but at the end of the day they are no different than someone taking socks from Walmart.
I agree that people just want free stuff, but stealing a physical object deprives someone of that object.
Copying media is strictly a violation of a business model. There is minimal (if any) marginal cost to the owner. Better analogies include sneaking into a (not full) movie, hopping a turnstile, or not putting money into the meter (again, when other spaces are available).
To the contrary the analogy is apt because when one takes the socks you are not harming the next consumer (sure the cost of shrinkage is passed on) and there are lots of places to get socks. But the party that is well and truly fucked the most is the producer of the socks who will derive no benefit from work spent, designing, promoting, producing or delivering the socks.
Your literal minded response suggests that, a product with a low incremental cost is a valid measure of of the total cost of production, which it is not. The cost is writers, actors, foley artists, costumers, grips etc. All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy. That is a thief who will never pay a legitimate fee for what they have taken.
You miss a very key point. What percentage of sock sellers buy socks if they can't steal them? The number of people who pirate digital content that they would otherwise have bought is a lot lower than 100%. Another point. And some of the Pirates already own what they are pirating. I've pirated content that I own as I'm not allowed to stream from a DVD drive in a computer I own to a tv I own for some reason. Piracy is also quicker than ripping old DVDs to a format that is actually useful so I'm happy to acknowledge what I get up to.
A better example would be someone copying the sock exactly and using this copied sock. Yes, this violates rights of the original sock designer and manufacturer, but it doesn't actually take their sock.
> All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy.
No. We could take a snapshot of some artist's bank account, ask her not to make or receive any payments for a short periods of while. During that while, I run a loop that downloads or makes a few million copies of some song or movie or whatever. Then we peek at her account again and look, the number is exactly as before. And again we have peace of mind in knowing that merely shuffling bits and bytes around a hard drive or even across a network link has no bearing on what happens in someone else's bank account.
No, the party that is fucked is the last step in the distribution chain, the one that actually sells the sock to the end user. The rest don't care, since the the sock store is just going to have to buy an additional sock from them to replenish stock.
That's the thing with physical goods. Once you receive money and give your customer the thing, if it gets stolen it's the customer's problem.
I have a couple quibbles with the way you're putting this, but I agree that the "copying costs nothing" argument does effectively pretend that the fixed costs of any production don't exist. The variable cost being zero is only tangentially relevant to the actual issue at hand.
The price isn't "zero" - it's a low-likelihood/high-impact risk of being sued for copyright infringement/having your internet shut off for "strikes"/moral guilt/etc.
I pay for Spotify for convenience and functionality (syncing between devices, perfect tagging/catalog/artwork), not because of any potential risks surrounding piracy.
It is a market failure. There exists a product, which is easily reproduced and simple to transport. These exists people who wish to purchase the product, and pay a fair price to do so - but cannot.
There's zero competition in the distribution/publishing side of things for a movie - i.e a retailer can't choose to buy Star Wars from anyone other than Disney, or the Bourne films from anyone other than Universal.
They have no potential incentive to be more responsive to market demands.
Market Segmentation is a great way to ensure the highest revenue per sale, so they sell it into each market for as much as the market will support.
Then there's exclusivity arrangements in the online side of things - so I can't get (say) Game of Thrones on Netflix.
In Australia I have to subscribe to Foxtel and pay a fortune for premium channels, and if I want to watch it online, well, I can get a pretty crummy quality stream in some other painful to use app. Or I can wait 12 months and buy it on DVD/Bluray, which are still only 1080p.
The distributors/publishers are free to fix that, today, if they wanted to - but they don't.
So griping about "regulations, laws and cronyism" doesn't ring true. (Well, maybe the last)
> “I strongly condemn piracy and find it generally damaging, but it is a symptom, not the source, of market failure,” he told TF.
That's it right there. Music piracy took a long time to sort out because it was inaccessible. Now through Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube I struggle to find anyone who pirates music in my peers (it was prolific). It's not perfect yet and I think there's still some change to come but it's certainly ahead of the film industry.